Botanical tree decorations

 Probably the best thing about Christmas is that the many pagan symbols used for our decorations are largely botanical.  As the decorations were getting packed away for another year, TPP took the opportunity to grab an image of the many tree decorations that were botanical. The most unusual is probably the passion fruit (between the pickle and the maize).  And the very common but a bit confounding fly agaric mushroom.  The most realistic is the head of garlic cloves.  These are all glass except for the sprig of mistletoe (upper left).  The oldest, a real antique, is the silver walnut in the bottom row.  And of course just because, there is a magnolia flower, and even some holly and holly berries a favorite pagan symbol of the season.

Public domain book illustrations

Here's a huge HT to the Agricultural Biodiversity Blog for  alerting us to the over 14 million images obtained by scanning books in the public domain, books on which the intellectual property rights have expired, a date that varies quite a bit from place to place, generally 70 years after the death of the author in the USA. At any rate, these are available at the Internet Archive but just browsing could take quite awhile. Search the commons on botany or plants and you'll get to see all manner of great old line drawings and illustrations, some of excellent detail and accuracy especially given their age. Here's an Epiphyllum, an orchid cactus, from Paxton's Magazine of Botany (1841); it caught TPP's attention because mine started flowering today, about three weeks after being brought inside for the winter.